Tundish

In an earlier post I commented on Kafka's canny suggestion that there was a kind of pre-concordance between bureaucracy and 'human nature'. The impersonal Organisations around us are our spider's web, spun from and revealing the effective constitution of 'the human,' where individuals are the dispensable bearers of larger symbolic mandates, occupy a pre-est. structural place etc. (Although Kafka perhaps also posits an animal community to which we simultaneously are fastened.)

But does not, a reader asks, positing an 'ontological bureaucracy' lend to actual bureaucracy a 'guarantee' in human nature and so foreclose any critique of the thing itself? If, as Kafka suggests, bureaucracy makes plain and sensible the very structure of the Human then there is a sense in which it is grimly unassailable. My text indeed provokes this question.

This raises familiar problems: sifting the ontological wheat from the historical chaff, prematurely ‘ontolologising’ specific historical phenomenon, and conversely, the need to historicise what wears the presumptive look of ontological fixity. Innit.

Instead of answering this question, let me offer another example of this 'ontologisation' from a different sphere. In Portrait of the Artist there is a well known passage in which Stephen tangles with the Dean of Studies over the word 'tundish':

'The language he is speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, Ale, Master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted his words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. '

For the colonial subject what should be most familiar, language, has been rendered foreign; the subject is fretfully 'outside' language, unable fully to inhabit it. Language is already owned by the (more powerful) Other, and despite being Stephen's mother tongue, it is not 'his own'. Stephen doesn’t quite feel himself present or reflected in the ‘I’ or ‘my’ which he utters. The pronouns are somehow outside the self, objects in the field of vision rather as opposed to the eye that sees. His linguistic 'home' is at one remove.

Now one response to this passage might be to say: the colonial condition in fact makes visible a truth about language as such. It really is the case that language is a foreign substance whose alien presence in our soul is both necessary and troubling. As a subject we do not occupy language, but squirm within it. Between the enunciating subject and the subject of enunciation there is an inevitable short circuit. Yous know the spiel. Thus, from the particular vantage point of a colonial condition, Joyce is granted privileged insight into a more universal truth, and is able to register experientially what would later be grasped conceptually: the dissolution of the Imaginary unity of word and being.

Perhaps. But this knowledge of language’s treacherous Otherness does not just reveal a Truth which it then leaves untouched. The relations to language, the possibilities of ‘expression,’ or experience itself, are themselves transformed by this ‘discovery’. As language 'enters into its concept' the concept too is enlarged and altered.